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Beppe Grillo leads revolt of the minstrels in Italy: Gwyn

He’s short and pudgy, his large mop of grey hair never looks combed and his choice of clothing is chaotic. He knows absolutely nothing about politics. He’s never given a public speech before except as a comedian telling political jokes.

Yet while ridiculed by almost all of the experts, he’s now the most interesting politician in Europe.

He’s Italy’s Beppe Grillo. Starting out with a single vote — his own — and no money or organization or policies, and soon getting banned by all the TV networks, he has just won 8.7 million votes or one-quarter of all of those cast in Italy’s recent parliamentary elections.

One way to think of him is as a kind of one-man Occupy Wall Street.

Another is captured by the description of him by Italy’s Nobel Prize-winning playwright Dario Fo (his best-known play, The Accidental Death of an Anarchist), who compares him to the medieval minstrels who “played with paradox and the absurd.”

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This is to say that Fo sees Grillo as a contemporary version of those minstrels and clowns of the Middle Ages who invented ways to tell truth to power without getting their heads chopped off.

All the members of the political class are aghast at what has happened. Grillo refuses to go into a coalition with other centre-left parties so no government is possible. Another election looms; almost certainly it will settle nothing.

Milan’s stock market has plunged and the rates charged on Italian government bonds have soared.

The entire European Union’s program to save its currency system, the euro, is at risk because if Italy gets away with misbehaving, so may Spain and Portugal and Greece.

So he’s done a lot of harm, as European businessmen and bankers and politicians are now saying, nervously as well as angrily.

The first good thing Grillo has done for Italy — and for Europe — is that his actual campaign was a role model of democracy in action. Banned from TV, he resorted to blogs and social media, and held rallies out in the streets. Vast numbers of people heard him — and switched their vote.

And while Grillo’s rhetoric was often out of control, he in fact was telling the truth.

First, that the Italian political class is — and has been for decades — comprehensively, irredeemably, corrupt, as well as thoroughly incompetent.

Next, that the austerity program imposed on Italy by an appointed prime minister, Mario Monti, highly able but unelected (Monti was appointed by the EU), is unsustainable because it is imposing too much pain. One measure of that pain is that in the last year 100,000 Italian small businesses have shut down.

Grillo’s specific solution — that Italy hold a national referendum to determine whether to leave the euro system — could itself do more harm than good: Italy would escape austerity at the cost of being cut off from all EU bailout funds.

But the alternative, the one preferred by the EU, of trying to keep the financial show going by keeping a corrupt political class in power, would do far more harm for far longer.

Grillo’s great accomplishment thus has been to make everyone think hard, Italians themselves most directly, but almost as much all the EU technocrats and attendant financiers.

Political eruptions, like that of Grillo and Occupy Wall Street, often don’t last. Very astutely, the playwright Fo has expressed the worry that what may bring Grillo down is flattery. Fo has said: “I’ve seen the glowing press and he must not fall for the adulation; it’s a honey-like trap.”

Most certainly, this may happen. But in the meantime, Grillo has told important pieces of the truth. And so far he, like those old-time minstrels and clowns, has got away with it, or as at least some of them once did.

The rest of the Italian election, above all the comparative success of former prime minister Silvio “Bunga Bunga” Berlusconi, is not worth wasting one word on.

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